Monday, February 24, 2014

Patching Conics
Time and time again I've watched people patch conics by using straight addition and ignoring the Oberth benefit. It is a very easy mistake to make. I'll give an example of this error for an earth to Mars delta V budget.

At perihelion an earth to Mars Hohmann orbit is moving about 33 km/s. 3 km/s is needed to leave earth's 30 km/s heliocentric orbit and enter this transfer orbit. In a similar fashion it takes 2.5 km/s to leave Hohmann transfer and match velocities with Mars.

But before we go from one heliocentric orbit to another, we need to escape the planet's gravity well. Earth's surface escape velocity is about 11 km/s. Mars' surface escape velocity is about 5 km/s.

The novice will look at these 4 quantities and simply add them. 11 + 3 + 2.5 + 5 is 20.5. They'll tell you it takes about 20.5 km/s to get from earth's surface to Mars surface.

But to accurately patch conics you need to use the hyperbolic orbit that takes you out of the planet's sphere of influence to a heliocentric orbit. Hyperbolic orbit speed is sqrt(Vescape2 + Vinfinity2). But what's Vinfinity? In this example it's the 3 km/s needed to go from earth's 30 km/s orbit to a Hohmann's 33 km/s. In Mars' neighborhood Vinfinity is the 2.5 km/s needed to exit Hohmann and match velocities with Mars.

If you remember high school math, sqrt( a2 + b2 ) should look familiar. It's the hypotenuse in the good old Pythagorean theorem! And that's what I use to visualize hyperbola speed:

The novice will tell once you've achieved the 11 km/s to escape earth's gravity well, you need another 3 km/s. The informed will tell you only another .4 km/s is needed.

For Mars to Earth the naive will tell you after you've reached 5 km/s to escape Mars then you need another 2.5 km/s to send the ship earthward. The savvy will tell you an additional .6 km/s is needed.

.4 vs 3 and .6 vs 2.5. In this case the novice method results in a 4.5 km/s overestimation of the delta V budget.

Erik Max Francis
I used to call this the Erik Max Francis Error. Delta V budgets from one planet to another would often come up in space usenet groups. Erik would use his Python BOTEC and give an answer to ten decimal places. People would ooooh and ahhhhh. Wow! Accurate to 10 significant figures! In reality Erik's answers were accurate to zero significant figures. I finally prodded him to correct his error. Now his BOTEC is accurate to 1 or 2 significant figures. So far as I know, he still gives answers to 10 decimal places.

Rune
Later I called it the Rune error. The total Vinf can be roughly estimated by subtracting Mars 24 km/s from earth's 30 km/s. And this is what Rune uses on the New Mars forum when Louis asks how much delta V is needed after you get out of earth's gravity well.

Brute force" trajectories would take about as much delta-v as is the difference between the orbital speeds of mars and earth, so about 29.8km/s (for earth) - 24km/s (for mars) = 5.8km/s

I have explained to the New Mars Forums many times that the speed of a hyperbola is sqrt(Vescape2 + Vinfinity2). Will Rune ever learn it? I doubt it.

But no matter, Rune's a member of Zubrin's cult. People expect Zubrinistas to be innumerate, nobody takes them seriously. But sadly they are loud and high profile. John Q Public can be misled into thinking they speak for all space advocates.

It's more damaging when someone in authority commits this error. Now I'm talking about Dr. Tom Murphy.

Professor Tom Murphy
This is from a graphic from Tom Murphy's Stranded Resources:

Murphy writes:

For instance, we travel around the Sun at a velocity of 30 km/s, while Mars sails at a more sedate 24 km/s. So to meet up with Mars, we have 6 km/s of extra velocity to burn, helping us up the hill. We speak of this as a Δv (delta-vee) adjustment to trajectory.

Same method as Rune for getting the total Vinf: Subtracting Mars' 24 km/s from earth's 30 km/s to get 6 km/s. An over estimation but not wildly inaccurate. And Murphy correctly shows earth's escape as 11 km/s and Mars escape as about 5 km/s.

But then Murphy straight up adds 11+6+5:

Crudely speaking, we must have the means to accomplish all vertical traverses in order to make a trip. For instance, landing on Mars from Earth requires about 17 km/s of climb, followed by a controlled 5 km/s of deceleration for the descent. Thus it takes something like 20 km/s of capability to land on Mars

Sounds like he's being generous to the poor deluded space cadets by rounding 22 down to 20. But the distance from earth's C3=0 to Mars C3=0 is not 6 km/s. It's about 1 km/s. Here's Murphy graph corrected for the Oberth benefit:

For comparison, Murphy's erroneous graph is left in but a shade lighter. From surface of Earth to Surface of Mars is about 16 km/s.

"But wait!" a Murphy apologist might say. "Murphy didn't include the delta V needed to rise above earth's atmosphere. That's 1.5 to 2 km/s! That makes the budget more like 18 which can be rounded up to 20."

An atmosphere does indeed add to delta V for departing a planet. On the other hand, an atmosphere is a big help for planet arrival. Park in a capture orbit with periapsis velocity just a hair under escape. Position the periapsis in the planet's upper atmosphere. Each orbit at periapsis, atmospheric friction slows the ship. This is known as aerobraking. Almost all of Mars' 5 km/s descent can dealt with via aerobraking. Here is Murphy's graph corrected for atmospheric influence:

Now it takes 13 or 14 km's to reach escape. But with descent taken care of with aerobraking it only takes another 1 km/s to reach Mars' surface. A more realistic delta V budget from earth surface to Mars surface is about 14 or 15 km/s.

And in fact numerous Mars landers and orbiters have used this method. I am stunned that Murphy, a self proclaimed space insider, has never heard of aerobraking.

Is a 6 km/s error a big deal? Since the exponent of the rocket equation scales with delta V, it's a very big deal. Murphy himself would tell you exponential growth can be dramatic.

In my opinion the limits to growth is the most important issue facing us. Can space resources raise the ceiling on our logistic growth? If so, it is worthwhile to invest in building space infra-structure. If not, expensive space infrastructure is a waste of money. We should look at the question seriously. That is why I get bent out of shape when a so-called authority makes common mistakes that would embarrass a freshman aerospace student.

Tom Murphy's arguments against space are often cited in discussions of limits to growth. When I find such a discussion, I will chime in that a bright high school student could tear apart Murphy's arguments. The most recent visit was at Mike Stasse's Damn The Matrix. As usual, the Do The Math crowd response was insults, appeal to authority, but no math.

Judging by Murphy's fans, his blog should be renamed "Don't do the Math. Take my word for it because I'm a Ph. D."

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Those who advocate Mars settlement like to say Mars can be terraformed. First I will take a look at what it would take to terraform Mars.

How much air do we need to add to Mars?

From NASA's Mars Fact Sheet, surface density of the Martian atmosphere is about .02 kg/m3. That is about 1.5% of Earth's surface air pressure of 1.27 kg/m3. Mars' atmosphere is virtually a vacuum.

Mars surface gravity is about 38% earth gravity. That means given an atmosphere of comparable temperature and composition, Mars atmosphere scale height is 264% earth atmosphere scale height. But Mars surface area is about about 28% that of earth's. 2.64 * .28 is about .75. To get comparable air density, we would need Mars' atmospheric mass to be about three quarters that of earth's atmosphere.

The total mass of the Martian atmosphere is about 2.5 x 1016 kg. Earth's atmosphere is about 5 x 1018 kg. So to make Mars surface air density earth like, we'd need 3.6 x 1018 kg of air added to Mars.

But do we need sea level air density? No, there are people who survive at higher elevations. This list of the world's highest cities show several places at around 5000 meter elevation. Granted the dwellers of the highest city La Rinconada, Peru don't live comfortably. But they demonstrate humans can endure air density half that of sea level. If half is sufficient, Mars only needs 1.8 x 1018 additional kilograms of air.

Would be Mars terraformers like to point at the frozen CO2 at the Martian poles. If Mars temperature is raised just a little, they hope the vaporized carbon dioxide would create a greenhouse effect that would cause more carbon dioxide to be vaporized. Their hope is that a runaway greenhouse effect could substantially boost Mars' atmosphere from frozen volatiles already in place.According to Wikipedia, there is thought to be a 1 meter thick layer of CO2 at Mars north pole, a cap about 1,000,000 meters in diameter. At the south pole there is an 8 meter thick layer of CO2 over a cap having a 350,000 meter diameter. That's about 1.6 x 1012 cubic meters of CO2. Dry ice has a density of 1.6 thousand kg/m3. If all of that CO2 is vaporized (an optimistic assumption) that totals about 2.5 x 1015 kg of atmosphere. Short by almost 3 orders of magnitude, a miniscule contribution toward the needed 1.8 x 1018 needed kilograms.

Even with Zubrin's very optimistic scenario, it seems we'd still need to import 1.5 1x 1018 kilograms of nitrogen.

Can we add to Mars' air with comets?

Zubrin and McKay suggest it'd take .3 km/s to nudge an ammonia asteroid in the outer solar system towards Saturn and then Saturn's gravity could throw the ammonia snowball Marsward.

"Consider an asteroid made of frozen ammonia with a mass of 10 billion
tonnes orbiting the sun at a distance of 12 AU. Such an object, if
spherical, would have a diameter of about 2.6 km, and changing its orbit
to intersect Saturn's (where it could get a trans-Mars gravity assist)
would require a DV of 0.3 km/s. If a quartet of 5000 MW nuclear thermal
rocket engines powered by either fission or fusion were used to heat
some of its ammonia up to 2200 K (5000 MW fission NTRs operating at 2500
K were tested in the 1960s), they would produce an exhaust velocity of 4
km/s, which would allow them to move the asteroid onto its required
course using only 8% of its material as propellant. Ten years of steady
thrusting would be required, followed by a about a 20 year coast to
impact. When the object hit Mars, the energy released would be about 10
TW-years, enough to melt 1 trillion tonnes of water (a lake 140 km on a
side and 50 meters deep). In addition, the ammonia released by a single
such object would raise the planet's temperature by about 3 degrees
centigrade and form a shield that would effectively mask the planet's
surface from ultraviolet radiation. As further missions proceeded, the
planet's temperature could be increased globally in accord with the data
shown in Fig. 12. Forty such missions would double the nitrogen content
of Mars' atmosphere by direct importation, and could produce much more
if some of the asteroids were targeted to hit beds of nitrates, which
they would volatilize into nitrogen and oxygen upon impact. If one such
mission were launched per year, within half a century or so most of Mars
would have a temperate climate, and enough water would have been melted
to cover a quarter of the planet with a layer of water 1 m deep."

This scheme presupposes we could land a 20 gigawatt power source on a rock in the outer solar solar system. For comparison the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in the United States, produces about 3.3 gigawatts. So we're sending 6 Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plants out past Saturn. McCay's scheme stipulates using the comet's mass as reaction mass. So now we have a mining and transportation infra structure on the comet that digs up the ice and places this reaction mass in the nuclear rocket engine.

If we have the wherewithal to establish such infrastructure, we certainly have the ability to build habs on these rocks.

Asteroidal Real Estate

How much asteroidal real estate could 1.5 1x 1018 kilograms of air give us? An O'Neill cylinder 8 kilometers in diameter and 32 kilometers long would give us 804 square kilometers of real estate. Such a cylinder would have a volume of 1.6e12 cubic meters. On earth's surface, our air has a density of about 1.27 kg per cubic meter. So that volume at 1 bar density would be 2e12 kilograms of air.

1.5e18/2e12 = 750,000. Three quarters of a million O'Neill habitats. Recall each cylinder has 804 square kilometers of real estate. 750,000 * 804 km2 = 603 million km2. Mars' surface area is 145 million km2. So if we put the asteroidal resources to use where they're at, we get 4 times as much real estate.

Some would point out that O'Neill cylinders are very extravagant pieces of mega-engineering. I completely agree! It's my belief that humans don't need a full g to be healthy, I believe .4 g (a little more than Mars' gravity) would suffice. In which case the hab radius could be 1.6 km. Such a hab would have only 321 km2 of real estate but a volume only 2.6e11 cubic meters. 2.6e11 m3 * 1.27 kg/m3 = 3.3e11 kilograms. 1.5e18/3.3e11 = ~4.5 million. 4.5 million of the smaller O'Neill habitats. 4.5 million * 321 = 1460 million square kilometers. Or about as much real estate as 10 Mars planets.

If the goal is to provide more real estate and resources for humanity, terraforming Mars is an extravagant waste. We should ditch planetary chauvinism and go for the small bodies.